CVE-2025-8489

published 2025-10-31

CVE-2025-8489: The King Addons for Elementor – Free Elements, Widgets, Templates, and Features for Elementor plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to privilege escalation in…

Priority P1 86 critical 9.8 CVSS 3.1

AV N AC L PR N UI N S U C H I H A H

ITW EXPLOIT VulnCheck KEV

The King Addons for Elementor – Free Elements, Widgets, Templates, and Features for Elementor plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to privilege escalation in versions 24.12.92 to 51.1.14 . This is due to the plugin not properly restricting the roles that users can register with. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to register with administrator-level user accounts.

Detection & IOCs extracted from sources · hover to see the quote

path /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php↗

command user_role=administrator↗

• → Monitor for unauthenticated POST requests to wp-admin/admin-ajax.php that include a 'user_role' parameter set to 'administrator' — this is the core exploitation mechanism of handle_register_ajax(). ↗
• → Alert on new WordPress administrator account registrations originating from unauthenticated sessions, especially when the King Addons for Elementor plugin (versions 24.12.92–51.1.14) is installed. ↗
• → After privilege escalation, watch for malicious plugin upload and activation via wp-admin — the Metasploit module follows account creation with plugin upload to achieve RCE. ↗

• · Affected version range is 24.12.92 to 51.1.14 — ensure detection rules and patch checks are scoped to this range. ↗

CVSS provenance

nvd v3.1 9.8 CRITICAL CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

vulncheck 9.8 CRITICAL

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